Five People Andy Loves, And One Person He Would Die For
by The Kapok Kid
Summary: Twenty-five years is all too short a lifetime, but Andrew Carpenter has loved more than most. COMPLETE.


Five People Andy Loves, and One Person He Would Die For

* * *

It's the last hour, but he isn't afraid. For men who have travelled through the valley of the shadow, for those who have been cast down, deep down into the seemingly fathomless pits of death and despair, and have climbed up the other side, and emerged into the light, for men such as he, fear does not exist.

Andy hasn't ever doubted that the other side exists. He just wonders what – or who – will greet him there.

He hopes it's she. Her touch was his first greeting into this world; and even now, he can feel her phantom fingers carding gently through his downy flaxen hair, and only smiles in response when Carrington gives him a strange glance. She was much more than just a Nanny– he's always thought of her like this, many years before his baby lips could string together the word 'mama.'

The glances and whispers followed him everywhere for the next few years, the looks heavy with sympathy, the words laced with pity: _motherless… orphan…_ and the most dreaded of all: _alone._ And he clung tightly to her hand with chubby fingers and averted his eyes, because all those well-meaning phrases weren't true.

She was his mother.

She'd nursed him through the childhood bouts of measles and whooping cough, and there was nobody prouder than she when he graduated with honours from Cambridge, or got his first commission in the China Station.

Heart failure took her, quickly and quietly, while he was on convoy two years ago, but he knows that she hasn't really gone away. And now, even as the Condors loom over the bridge, the staccato of their machine-guns pounding in his ears, their fire stitching holes in his chest, it's her scent that fills his nose, and her voice that calls him home.

* * *

He met Juanita when he was sixteen. Fittingly, it was in church, on a bright, cold Christmas morning. The sunbeams danced palely through the windows and through the stained glass above the door, and cast their sparkling patterns on the old agate floor. They also cast a golden glow on her cheeks, and shimmered through the raven waves on her shoulders.

He looked up, and choked.

She locked gazes with him, wicked brown eyes spilling over with laughter, and smiled.

Johnny had laughed too, and claimed indigestion when he'd described it, but Andy likes old-fashioned romance, and he isn't ashamed. He'd gone away to sea the very next day, but the memory of those eyes never left him.

His leave was all too few and far between, but for the next eight years, those too-short days were full of long, lazy walks down tree lined streets, or meandering the banks of the Thames. She wore green so often it became his favourite colour, and they picked apples every autumn evening, so they became his favourite fruit. They both like labradors and jammy scones, so that last evening they went down to the Grey Goose to see the tiny new puppies and drink coffee from Dresden china teacups. His heart was so full he thought it would burst.

 _Vaya con Dios,_ she'd said to him after that last, lingering kiss, and truly, he intends to do just that.

The ring lies heavy in pocket, a dead-weight dragging him down to the duckboards in a futile attempt to avoid the oncoming bombers. He didn't give it to Johnny, because every man must give his girl his own ring.

Maybe eight years is too long a time to wait for the perfect engagement day, but Andy wishes he has just one day more.

* * *

Gravity and earnestness are not the outward suit of this R.N. Navigator, but heavy quilted one-piece kapok certainly is. Lieutenant Commander James Carrington it was who'd nicknamed him the Kapok Kid. He's proud to bear this moniker; not least because the First Lieutenant is the taciturn type who'd sooner scowl at a man than call him endearments. To be singled out so makes him feel as though he's blessed by divine decree.

Carrington has been his mentor since day one; handpicking him out of a dozen midshipmen on their first commission in China. They've sailed the eastern seas and the Indian Ocean together, done the Atlantic and Malta convoys, and been deck officers together on the _Ulysses_ ever since she was commissioned. Number One is a consummate seaman, but a greater man; a fair taskmaster, demanding perfection in each quarter, but never overtaxing him beyond his capability. Praise is hard won, but no accolades ever ring sweeter than these in his ears.

Johnny's eyes had opened wide, glimmering with reflected disbelief when he'd told him that he was glad Carrington was there, and he understands. No superman, but yet a superman.

Andy wears humour as he would a cloak, and flippancy like a shield and sword, but he'd been completely serious, then. He hides away his respect and admiration carefully, as though it was some secret treasure, never letting even a flicker of adulation or hero-worship show through.

Nobody calls the First Lieutenant _Jimmy._ But he did once, and Jimmy smiled. He hid his own answering smile.

But now, on this shattered bridge, back against the Admiral's chair, racked with pain and almost gone, he can feel the warmth, see those clear eyes gazing into his. There's time for one last smile, and Andy hopes the _thank you_ shows through.

* * *

Navigation was supposed to be his sole duty when he joined the _Ulysses,_ but he'd hoped there would be something more. The Navy was his life, and he loved it; but there'd been something lacking – a thread of excitement and danger in the tapestry of naval discipline and hierarchies. Perhaps this longing could be put down to youth – but there wasn't any difference between twenty-two and twenty-five in the long run – and he'd been looking for this for a long time.

He found it in Captain Vallery.

 _Richard Vallery_ wasn't just a name. Certainly, he was dead now; as dead as blood and flesh and bones could ever be, but the soul does not die. The soul is immortal; not a pair of wings taking flight from a slumbering body and disappearing, but a living, pulsing force, entering the hearts and minds and souls of men, uplifting them and casting them down, whole and undamaged, on the other shore.

He was successively astonished and delighted to find in himself a desire to do more than his minimum duties; an enduring will to protect and to defend, to destroy the enemy and bring his people to triumph.

Andy wasn't often at a loss for words, but words left him witless when he tried to describe this man. Captain Vallery was a man indeed, but he was much more than just a man.

When the Captain died, he took with him the meagre physical reserves of the ship's crew, but he left behind a lasting legacy: courage and strength of the best kind. Andy liked to consider himself unique amongst officers and men, but at the most decisive juncture of his life, he was no different to them; for in that last inexorable hour, they fought for Vallery, and for Vallery alone.

* * *

Let no man ever say that the Honourable Andrew Carpenter is brotherless, for Johnny Nicholls will punch him in the face. He loves Johnny, and he knows that Johnny loves him, but being manly men of advanced years – they're both aged twenty-five – they hide these unseemly fraternal feelings under the heavy padding of the kapok suit on his part, and claims of indigestion on Johnny's.

Break a leg for luck, the old saying goes, and maybe he did get lucky when he broke his leg up on that fishing trip in Scotland. He was eighteen years old and very woolly in the head when he woke up hours later in a hospital bed, to find Johnny's equally eighteen year old figure, capped and gowned, scowling down at him, waving a whopping needle menacingly over his leg.

He was even luckier when they were both drafted aboard the _Ulysses;_ he as Pilot, Johnny as Acting Surgeon-Lieutenant.

Johnny calls it an attraction of opposites: Andy's adoration of the Navy and outgoing nature against his own detestation of military command and his natural reticence. And so it certainly seems, on the surface; light matched with dark, ebullience with quiescence.

A knife twisted his gut when Johnny was transferred aboard the _Sirrus._ He won't be seeing Johnny again, but he's giving him the best he possibly can; part of himself, part of his heart. They say it should hurt, wrenching your heart, splitting it apart, but it doesn't. Instead, it feels like love.

Carefully, surreptitiously, he observes the lines of Johnny's face, the smile at his lips, the soft light in those brown eyes; lingering on the paper and savouring that most beloved name of all.

 _Their favourite song, their favourite name._

Maybe, Andy thinks, just maybe, they're very much the same after all.

* * *

He loves her. She's part of him, as she's part of all of them, these three hundred and fifty six men who've sailed the Fast Russian Convoys, day in, day out, without rest for the twenty months since their conception. She's a lucky ship, and not even the DNO dares to interfere with the crew assignments after her initial fitting.

Admiral Tyndall, though, feels no such restraint, and has often threatened to transfer Andy to the _Sirrus,_ to be Commander Orr's Navigator on his next command. Tyndall won't follow through with this, ever, but he finds it prudent to retire to the charthouse just in case, whenever the subject is mentioned. The Admiral loves him really; and anyway, he's far too important to transfer – it's not a boast, but a simple fact that the ship relies on his navigation far too much. He knows the senior officers laugh at him sometimes, but he doesn't mind.

He can't conceive of a life away from the _Ulysses._ He loves Henley – it's his home after all, and in the worst of times on convoy, when life appears more than ever to be a silk-spun thread, holding thin, so thin it might snap at any moment; when the pom poms and the oerlikons across the decks stutter and fade into silence in the face of gliding, swooping Heinkels and Focke-Wulfs, bearing down on them, monstrous mouths gaping open, then does his mind fly to Henley, to the banks of the Thames and _she_ , all in green, with sparkling eyes…

But it always returns to the _Ulysses._ Even in the middle of insurmountable danger and death and war, there's nowhere else he'd rather be.

That first morning at the Scapa Flow docks, he'd arrived, bag in hand, tired out after travelling all night from his leave in Henley, and she'd been there. Just there, floating, an ethereal, mystic spirit, unsubstantiated, ghostlike, shrouded in the cold Scottish morning fog. He'd fallen in love then, even before he set foot on the gangway, and he's still in love now.

Every inch of her – the scrubbed duckboards on the bridge where he shared watches with the Commander, with Carrington, and with Guns, the slightly tilting compass platform where he'd stand with Johnny and watch the ship being turned around, the Charthouse where he hangs his crimson gauntlets and sneaks cigarettes, his tiny cabin next to Johnny's where they drilled a hole in the dividing wall and pretended to be utterly unaware when the wrath of Commander Dodson descended upon them – unforgettable places, familiar smells that envelope his pores and permeate his heart, etched in his memory and in his soul.

This is the last dawn. The next sunrise will be on the other side, for him, and for her. No matter about him, for men are born to die, but she won't die – not really. She's immortal, and he's proud. Proud to defend her, to be part of her.

 _H.M.S Ulysses._

Home and heart and final resting place.


End file.
